I spent a stormy afternoon this week at Pigeon Point Light. I saw lightening, hail, driving – blowing rain and a couple of great rainbows. This picture is from my car while I was waiting for a squall line to pass. That’s the Lighthouse in the distance.

The Recent Work gallery has pictures I made when it wasn’t raining quite as hard. All in all, it was a great day including a side trip to Duarte’s in Pescadero for some Olallieberry pie and coffee — I was waiting out yet another squall.

I’m not a birder but I find Pelicans to be the most fascinating birds to watch. These guys are definitely my favorite bird. I have taken a lot of pictures of them. In fact, I’m sure you noticed my logo features a pelican. Want to learn more about the birds? Read this or this.

Brown Pelicans were taken off the Federal Endangered Species list late last year. California may remove them from the State Endangered list soon. Now, there seems to be a problem with the Pelicans. The DFG estimated 500 pelicans – state wide – that were sick or dead had been found earlier this year. The San Francisco Bay Oiled Wildlife Care and Education Center has received more than 100 pelicans for treatment. The birds are, among other things, starving to death. The Daily Breeze( in SoCal) has a short article about the problem.

So, if you see a Pelican that’s obviously having a problem, contact the San Francisco Bay Oiled Wildlife Care and Education Center. Don’t try to help the bird yourself unless you are trained to do so. Here’s the address:
San Francisco Oiled Wildlife Care & Education Center (SFBOCEC)
4369 Cordelia Road
Fairfield, CA 94534
E-Mail: no_cal_center [at] ibrrc.org
Wildlife hospital: (707) 207-0380 ext. 110

I’ve been using my GPS receiver and some home-brewed software to Geotag my photos for some time. Well, full disclosure: While I’ve written a fair amount of code(PERL) I use two programs to do some of the heavy lifting: EXIF Tool to write into the files and GPS Babel to read the GPS receiver. But, I just learned of another program that’s way cool: GPS Visualizer

The GPS Visualizer website will allow you to upload a track file and then plots it on a map of your choosing. There are several options including most of the Google map versions. Here’s a map of yesterday’s shoot(Click on it to see it full size).

I spent the afternoon at the East Bay Parks Redwood Regional Park. It’s definitely a recommended hike. See recent work for some examples of the scenes in the Park. I went in at the Skyline Entrance but there are lots of other places to explore the park from. See the East Bay webpage for more info.

Apple launched the new iPad(poor name, good idea) recently. While it’s not the first device with similar characteristics – think Kindle – it does have more capabilities and, with Apple behind it, probably more market share in the future. But, as a photographer, I think we are seeing a new direction for photography. (The title of this post comes from the fact that I’m sure there are a lot of people who saw this a long time ago.)

The old way of selling people photos is going to disappear sooner rather than later. I refer to the print market. Sure, well-known photographers will still sell prints for people to hang on their walls. But the millions of us who are, shall I say, less well-known, might still be able to develop a market of sorts. Web sites like Flickr already are making millions of photos available to the masses. And many people have smart phones and/or digital pictures frames. For purposes of this post, I think of the iPad as a giant smart phone even though it’s far more than that.

So, people trying to sell their pictures of, say, a local sports team, might want to target just digital photos. Forget trying to set up a website to sell prints, nobody has either the wall space or the desk space to exhibit print photos. The smart phones and the digital picture frames provide us with unlimited wall space. More on this later…

I spent the day at Uvas Canyon. It’s a great little park in the vicinity of Morgan Hill – the county is Santa Clara County. The recent work gallery has been updated to show some of the scenes from the Canyon. On my way up, I ran into an couple of hikers on their way down the path. They mentioned there were “hundreds” of hibernating lady bugs along the path. So, I made a picture on some of them. Hundreds doesn’t begin to describe it. This is definitely a recommended hike. Get out there and do it.

Finally got out for a while today but there were significant differences in subjects from beginning to end. Started out looking for color in Golden Gate Park. Not much luck but did find a few things. On the way home, stopped by Fort Point to check out the surfing. There were fairly big waves and quite a few surfers so I banged away for a while. The shot here is my favorite of the day but check out the others.

I’ve updated the main page and the recent gallery to a new look. The major change is that Flash is no longer used. The Recent Gallery now uses JavaScript – jQuery and a plug-in called GalleryView 2.0. There’s not much documentation on how to set it up but I found a website that had a working example.

I’m not all that happy with the recent gallery at this point so there may be more changes in the coming weeks.

Lagunitas Creek in Marin County is a “must see” destination for salmon. They have arrived. Here’s a really lousy picture of one I took today. It’s dark in there and I don’t have a 600mm f/2.8 lens so it was a difficult shot. This one was hand held at 1/10 sec. You can see a better shot, and read about tours on the SFgate website.

BTW, the docent was incredibly informative and helpful. I recommend a trip to see the salmon. It’s a great experience. Here’s the location, I think. (Didn’t have my GPS receiver on.)

Later — Today’s Chronicle has a front page story about the salmon. I might disagree with the statment, in the article, that says ” Dozens of coho salmon have been spotted.” According to the docent yesterday, they are aware of six salmon in that area of the creek. But the Chron may be referring to all of Marin. Who knows?

The most recent issue of Sierra, the Sierra Club magazine, has an article with some awesome photos of waves. Check it out on the Sierra Club website. Makes me feel beat up just looking at them.